Goodbye Again (22 page)

‘I’ll talk to the Sister now, and I’ll sell the painting for you when I get back to England, and send the money.’

‘No, come back with the money, Benjamin. You’re much more important. Come back often – and take whatever you want of the money yourself.’

‘All right, I will.’

I bent down, kissed her on the forehead, and went to talk to the Sister. I showed her the picture, explaining who it was by and who
it was of. She hadn’t heard of the artist, but she saw the likeness in the nude woman.

‘The face,’ she said firmly, not looking at the nude body. ‘Yes, it’s certainly Signora Battaglia.’

I said that I was going to sell it, on Signora Battaglia’s behalf, so that they could buy the villa and the hill. The Sister was suitably grateful, but in the manner of having received expected news, something that God had in mind for them all along.

It was raining hard. The Sister called me a taxi. Waiting for it, I thought I had all my answers now, except about Katie – and I didn’t need any answers about her, now that I had Elsa. I thought of burning Katie’s diary and throwing the ashes over the small town where we’d been so happy. But there were no fireplaces in the hotel, so rather than condemn it to the hotel garbage bin, I packed it before we left Carrara for the airport next morning. I wasn’t really sorry we weren’t going over the mountains into the olive groves. I was going back with Elsa to my old barn. And that was a far better thing, what I’d wanted from the very start – to make a proper story of my life at last, and to make it with Elsa.

It was mid September when we got back to my Cotswold barn. I’d called Margery, my landlord’s wife, from the airport and the taxi we’d taken from Kingham station had dropped us off at their farmhouse at the top of the lane. I said to Elsa, ‘They’re going to think you’re Katie. They met her several times, but I’ll explain.’

‘Some explaining.’

Elsa was right. When we turned up at the door Tom said nothing, expressionless. Margery, on the other hand, looking at Elsa, was startled.

‘It’s all right, Margery. This is another friend of mine, Elsa – Elsa Bergen.’

‘Oh.’

They were puzzled, but welcomed us warmly. We were ushered into the kitchen. They were about to have their tea – ham on the bone, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, a big chunk of cheddar, and salad cream laid out on the long pine table.

‘Yes, it’s strange to meet someone who looks so like someone else,’ I added.

‘It is,’ Margery said, in an easier manner, ‘but then you’re always coming up with surprises, Ben. You’ll have tea with us,’ she continued. ‘There’s plenty.’

‘Oh, no, we don’t want to disturb …’

‘Not at all. It’s good to see you both – to see you back.’

She busied herself about the kitchen. The kettle was murmuring on the hob, with a big brown teapot next to it. She got out one of her white home-baked crusty loaves from the bread bin. We took our places. Silence.

‘You’ve hurt your arm,’ Margery spoke with concern.

‘Oh, that’s nothing. Climbing the mountains in Italy – we were on holiday. I slipped. You got my card?’

‘Oh, yes, we got your card. Thank you.’

‘Slippery mountains,’ Tom said. ‘Marble, the card said. They’d be slippery mountains all right.’

They both looked at us, covertly, bemused, the strangeness of this woman, who was both Katie and Elsa, sinking in. Elsa was sitting beside me. Since becoming one-armed, she cut up any difficult food for me. I sat there, disarmed, dependent, almost useless. It was still a new feeling, but it was surely good for me not to be in control for once. I said brightly, ‘Second childhood!’

We tucked in and I told them a little of what had happened to us on my ‘painting holiday’ as I put it, in France and Italy; a barge trip, walking in the Italian mountains where I’d slipped and hurt my arm, and so on. ‘And here?’ I asked. ‘All well here? The weather and the crops?’

‘Well, it wasn’t that good a summer, too many storms, the winter barley was flattened.’ Tom complained a bit more before Margery interrupted him.

‘Tom, stop moaning and give them a bit of gin in their tea.’

Tom got the bottle of gin out and doused my tea with it. Elsa showed surprise at this old rural habit, but couldn’t refuse. Tom took a good whack for himself. We chatted. Nobody mentioned how alike Elsa and Katie were.

I’d left my car in one of Tom’s dry barns. He came with us to see it started.

‘But you can’t drive it one-armed,’ Elsa said.

‘Oh yes I can, down the lane at least.’

The car wouldn’t start. Battery flat. Tom had to get leads, attached to the battery of his Land Rover. The huge engine murmured into life.

‘Logs,’ Tom said, ‘You’ll be coming up for some logs, I expect. They say it’ll be a hard winter.’

‘Thank you – yes, I’ll be up, Tom. Thank you.’

We drove off down the lane, over the fierce bumps, in and out of the ruts, and with half a mug of gin in me I sang the ‘Skye Boat Song’, loudly. Things seemed to be turning out well at last, but looking at Elsa, my doubts surfaced again. She was staring straight ahead, not unhappy, or happy. Just silent. The huge flax field on either side was just an expanse of dry stubble in the waning evening light. We passed Katie’s beech tree, which I didn’t point out.

Elsa seemed to like the barn just as much as Katie had. The wide open spaces and the doves were still there, cooing and chuckling in the rafters above my studio, having left quite a snowfall of droppings and feathers on the flagstones below in my absence. This didn’t worry Elsa. Even the outdoor privy didn’t.

A touch of autumn in the air, so I lit a fire in the huge grate, dry wood, and soon the flames were roaring up the chimney. I went
outside and pumped up water into a bucket, and Elsa helped me fill up the big preserving pan I used to heat the water, and we put it on the electric plate of the old cooker. When it was warm we poured it into the old porcelain sink and Elsa tidied up, washing the plates and glasses and putting away the bottles I’d last used, and emptied, that evening after Katie had died, nearly two months before, when I’d left for Dublin the next morning.

‘There’s nothing much in the cupboard,’ I said. ‘We can go shopping tomorrow, buy some anchovies, extra-virgin olive oil and white bread, and maybe a shoulder of Welsh lamb to roast, with potatoes, mint sauce, and a bottle of Rioja Reserva. Can’t do better.’

‘No. That’s true.’

I went to my old music centre, turned it on. I still had my Richard Tauber tape in it: ‘Without a Song’, the violins tentative at first, gradually finding the theme, then the passionate, high tenor voice. I came back to the sink, grasped her round the waist with my one good arm, and slow-waltzed her round the flagstones.

‘God, I’m happy,’ I said.

‘I know you are.’

We danced. She held me with one arm, the other holding the washing-up brush, both of us one-armed now. We sat on the big divan by the fire. I wanted to make love, but I sensed she didn’t. So I didn’t suggest it. I waltzed her back to the sink.

While she finished the washing up I climbed the open wooden staircase to the studio. There was the partly completed clay sculpture of Katie in the corner. I covered it with a sheet and made sure all the paintings of her were turned to the wall. I was starting a new life, wasn’t I?

She said when I came back, looking at me steadily, ‘Incurable romantic.’

‘Who wouldn’t be, with you around?’

‘Thank you.’ She stopped, indecisive, as if she’d been about
to voice the same feeling for me. She didn’t. ‘But thank you,’ she continued, ‘for thinking that way.’ She smiled.

We made love that night, in the big divan by the dying embers of the fire, but it was somehow an inconclusive engagement. It was warm again the next morning, a fine autumn day. I asked if I could paint her. I didn’t say nude, just to paint her. And she agreed, though I had the feeling that again she was simply keeping a promise.

We went upstairs, and she helped me get my paints ready – oil, turps, cleaning my brushes, getting a fresh primed canvas out, two by four, setting it up on the easel. One-handed and even with her help, my progress was slow and awkward, and I cursed myself. Later she came up in her shorts and T-shirt and together we worked out the best place for her to pose. I had an old chaise longue, picked up from the dump, on which I’d painted Katie. I moved it away from the direct light from one of the skylights. I had no longer expected, or even wanted, to paint her nude. But then, as if it were part of another commitment to me, like a paid model, she got undressed, sat down, raised her legs and propped herself up against the back of the chaise longue.

I asked her to get comfortable. She moved about until she found a position she liked. Half on her side, so that her legs were firmly closed, one arm partly covering her breasts, the other casually hiding her sex, face turned away in half-profile. A shy position, covert, hiding something. Like Katie when I’d painted her in the last years. Like Emilia in the Modi nude.

And gazing at Elsa, I thought to abandon the whole painting, for I was looking at all I had lost with Katie – the same build, sharp cut of cheekbones, chin. I was gazing at the same shapes and contours, colours and shadows of Katie – of all that was dead. Perhaps I was tempting fate to paint Elsa nude.

Dropping the stick of charcoal I said, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea painting you like this.’

‘Oh go on!’ she said, bright now, almost provocative. Indeed provocative, for she changed position, taking her arms away from between her legs and her breasts, and let her legs relax, thighs slightly open.

Now I wanted to paint her.

I moved the easel towards the end and to the side of the chaise longue, so that I was looking down along her body at an angle, and started to line in her shapes with the charcoal stick. Quickly, getting the crucial flow of her body and the angles right – the slightly risen leg, the torso, the arm lines, how her hands would have to go. What the right balances were. Back and head propped up, her face slightly turned away from me.

Her face. Elsa’s face, which so recently I had seen with every sort of vivid expression. Anger, terror, laughter, her bemused smile. That bright, tense, abandoned face, when we’d first made love the night before O’Higgins had arrived. Now her expression was mute.

Finally I had the lines right, and the first quick washes of paint. I painted fast, a broad brush filling in a light-umber background, a medium brush, peachy white, on the body. Sweeps of colour, but the light was too bright. I stopped and pulled the curtain over one of the skylights above me. I needed more subdued tones. Softer peach on her stomach, a paler lemon on her thighs. And the umber of the chaise longue was too severe. I clothed out a lot, diluted, softened the paints, worked rapidly. I painted fast again. Her face now.

Her face. Of course it wasn’t that mute. It said something. Harry always said that was my gift, that I could display better than most painters the secrets in a person’s face. So what did Elsa’s expression hide now? The fact that she was slipping away from me. So that after another ten minutes I said I’d done enough and we stopped, and I said, ‘Let’s go to a pub I know, have lunch in the sun. I’ll show you how to drive the Bentley. It’s not difficult.’

She drove the big car well. I wondered – should I ask her what
was wrong? But I knew what her problem was, the knowledge she had now of her father, one of the worst Nazi war criminals and murderers. But we’d talked that out, I hoped. Meanwhile, it was time just to be happy – to make her happy.

So at the Plough Inn, and for the next few days at the barn as I painted her, I talked of what was happy there and then, in front of us – the crystal autumn weather, golden views over the corn stubble, of present moments lost in the Wolds, of my work, and hers, her book on olives and olive oil. But she seemed to have lost interest in all this, despite my encouragements, so I spoke of the chance of my doing good work again and the purely material gains that beckoned me.

‘The
Sorrento
,’ I told her that evening. ‘I’ll go over and see Harry in Paris soon, put the boat on the market, get some cash so I can have plumbing put in here, and a phone. And then there’s the Modi nude. Have it auctioned. Maybe ten or fifteen million dollars. Well, I’ll take 10 per cent, the rest to Emelia and the sisters, so I could maybe buy the barn from Tom and do it up properly.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but not to any of my implicit invitations for her to share in these changes with me, for she went on immediately, ‘You have a future there.’ Oh, yes, a future beckoned everywhere, yet Elsa gave no sign that she wanted to share it.

Up at the Phillips’ farmhouse I called Angela in Yorkshire and spoke to our daughters, Molly and Beatty, who happened to be in the cottage with her. They’d received my innocent postcards from Carrara. I talked briefly of the long painting holiday I’d taken. Molly was thriving at university in Edinburgh, and Beattie had done well on her A levels and had applied to do French and Art History at St Andrews. They were both keen on the Scottish connection. I said I’d see them soon, we’d make a date, up in Yorkshire or down with me in the Cotswolds.

I called Harry that evening, with a more truthful account of
things. I asked him if he’d check my boat out and pay the dues, and said I’d be over in a week or so when I’d tell him all. Harry could wait.

What couldn’t wait was Elsa. I had to get her out of her dumps, that empty expression, which I didn’t want to paint. There had to be some present happiness for her, if there was to be a decent painting, let alone a future for us.

Happiness between two people can be silence, of course, but silence can hardly be sustained on a twenty-four-hour basis, with the two of us alone in the barn, sleeping together. One has to speak of something. Especially during the hour or so every morning when I was painting her.

So next morning, when she was comfortable again on the chaise longue, I said, ‘I wonder, if I was a writer, if I’d write about our last six weeks together – rather than painting you?’

‘It would take much longer.’

‘Well, I, we – we have the time now.’